Dr. Franken Stein / Mad Scientist

I recently got into the anime Soul Eater with the help of Netflix's instant streaming. The show's awesome and the characters are all cool and colorful. Many of them would provide great Halloween costumes since the show takes place at the grim reaper's school located in the middle of Death City. Since I've started watching the show, I've always wanted to make a costume of Dr. Franken Stein:

Dr. Stein is a professor at the academy and an expert of martial arts. He also wields a crucifix-shaped scythe on occasion.

I think this would be incredibly fun to make and wear as a costume, especially for fellow Hot Halloween Costume Blog author Brian Smith. Stein is a witty, intelligent character who chain smokes while teaching his students and tracking down witches.

The basic costume would be fairly simple:

Start with a plain white lab coat, form-fitting dark-green pants, and a turtleneck sweater. You'd also need a pair of glasses and maybe some candy cigarettes (unless you're a smoker). He wears tan and white boots, although any white or tan boot or sneaker would look just fine.

To make it more detailed, you'd want to face paint the stitches coming under and up the left eye. You could then either stitch (if you have the time, patience, and equipment) the lab coat around the sleeves, lapels, pockets, and sides (or draw it in with a fine-point permanent marker). With the sweater you could go several ways. You could find a multi-color sweater at a thrift store or find several and patch them together. Both would look great, but again, it comes down to time, patience, and personal preference. The boots wouldn't be difficult, either. Take a pair of hiking or construction boots and cover with white fabric with tan stitching (like socks for your shoes!).

The tough part would be the screw in his head. I guess you could go a few way with this: either make it as part of a head band or tape it on to your head. Head band would probably be the way to go. When Stein is preparing for a fight or thinking hard about something, he often turns this screw, so if you wanted to do the same, you'd have to make at least the head of the screw can pivot.

My personal recommendation for the screw would be to cut some foam into the screw shape (flat-style), spray paint it a metallic silver and attach this to a brad. Then I'm thinking a thicker construction paper head band should be enough to hold this in place, keep the screw in place but turn-able, and, if kept narrow enough, should be minimally visible (at least from the front or back). Maybe cover this with a white, straight-hair wig? 

I found a few pictures fellow nerds put up online of their costumes on Google:

Awesome.

And apparently they sell the costume online (http://www.hellocosplay.com/soul-eater-cosplay-dr-franken-stein-costume-p-1609.html) for $105.00. But I think you'll have much more fun (and feel more rewarded) putting it together yourself.